Florida beats USF, 31-28

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“Unacceptable.”

“Embarrassing.”

“Yikes.”

“Can’t defend it anymore.”

“McElwain vibes.”

Those were some of the calmer messages I received in the wake of Florida’s 31-28 victory over South Florida Saturday night. Perhaps the best description I received was from Read & Reaction’s own Nick Knudsen, who texted me the following:

“South Florida kicked our ass tonight. They’re not a good team.” – Nick Knudsen, Read & Reaction

Billy Napier can try and assert that South Florida actually is a high quality team, as he did in the post-game press conference, but he’s wrong. This is a Bulls team that lost by 29 points at home to BYU and gave up 418 yards of total offense (albeit on 77 plays) to Howard.

And then they came out and had the Gators on the ropes with nearly 300 yards rushing until they finished the game with a terrible snap for a loss of 14 yards on second-and-6 at the Gators 19 and then a bobbled snap on the final field goal attempt.

Anthony Richardson was bad again. The defense got gashed repeatedly in the running game. I’m not sure any of us know where the team goes from here with a road trip to Knoxville on the horizon.

But one thing is for sure. The Gators have a lot of work to do.

Do your job…..the Gators defense

As Napier went into the locker room at halftime, he said a lot of things to Cole Cubelic, but the thing he said that resonated with me was just simple: “do your job.”

The reason it resonated with me is because Florida’s defense reverted back to what it was last year: a bunch of rogue actors freelancing rather than trusting each other to get the job done. In a game like this, there are a lot of examples, but I’ve just selected a few here as illustrations.

You’ll often hear an announcer or coach talking about filling gaps. What does that mean? Well, on a play like this – a third-and-18 play for USF – it means making sure that the running back has to slow down or change directions if he comes your way. That buys time for your teammates to come make a gang tackle or get off of their blocks.

That’s the issue with this play. Antwaun Powell-Ryland, Jr. (#52) knows where to go. He is in the gap. But he doesn’t fill the gap. I say that because instead of taking on the pulling tackle, he tries to sidestep him. The result is that the USF running back (Brian Battie, #21) doesn’t have to slow down or change directions. Amari Burney (#2) tries to get off his block towards a cutback lane, but Battie just runs straight ahead and Burney isn’t involved in the play.

That sort of things was a problem for Florida’s linebackers all night long.

I watched this play up to where I paused it and thought, “how in the world did USF score on this play?” Brenton Cox (#1) has contain on the outside. Amari Burney (#2) is headed for the gap where the pulling USF guard and tight end are headed. Shemar James (#6) didn’t allow the streaking wide receiver get him out of position. And Gervon Dexter (#9) is holding up against an initial double team.

But then you unpause it and see Cox try to jump outside the pulling guard (very similar to what I showed on the last play for Powell-Ryland, Jr.). You see Burney get a step or two out of position because of the toss fake to the running back moving towards the outside. And you see the right guard get off of Dexter up to James at the second level. The result is an easy TD rather than a short gain.

Cox was the best player on the field for the last two drives of the game, but he looked lost at times in the first half.

Florida was already outmanned on this play, as they only had 6 defenders against USF’s 7 blockers. But Cox sheds his man to the outside and has an opportunity to tackle the USF ball carrier. But he instead hesitates thinking Bohanon may have kept the ball.

The problem is that Avery Helm (#24) is blitzing from the corner. The whole point of blitzing the corner here is to allow Cox to crash on the running back. Instead, he hesitates and Florida has two defenders staring at Bohanon with nobody up the middle as the running back streaks up the field.

This wasn’t an isolated incident.

Helm (#24) is blitzing from the outside again. The only outside threat is Bohanon keeping the ball and leaking out the backside. Yet Cox (#1) fires at Bohanon, guessing he’s going to keep the ball. Instead, he hands it off and again, his teammates on the inside are overmatched.

The problem with each of these plays is that the Gators have a defensive player not doing his job within the scheme. That creates a cascading effect where teammates have to cover for the space that is vacated and start cheating out of position in case they have to cover for a freelancing teammate because they don’t trust that everyone will do their job.

We can talk all about Patrick Toney’s scheme, but it doesn’t matter what scheme is being run if the players – all the players – aren’t going to execute it.

Richardson’s Struggles

Anthony Richardson was bad for a second game in a row. I wrote earlier in the week that we didn’t have a whole lot of data points to make long-range determinations about Richardson, but this now makes 3 bad starts out of 4 total. At some point, that becomes a pattern.

His QB rating of 85.6 was abysmal. For the second straight game, he had a negative Yards Above Replacement (YAR) of -0.75. You don’t win a lot of games with QB like that.

Luckily for the Gators, USF’s Gerry Bohanon was even worse. And when Richardson threw what looked like the backbreaking interception in the USF end zone, Bohanon gave the ball right back to the Gators with an interception of his own.

Whenever you stat line is that bad, there are a lot of things to correct, but I want to focus on one particular issue that seems to be flummoxing Richardson. But first, let’s look at a play where he was successful.

On this third-and-7, USF only rushes four players. But what you see is that they do not have anyone spying Richardson to prevent him from running with a bunch of players dropping into zone. When the play breaks down, Richardson is able to get outside and get the first down relatively easily.

That’s something Richardson seems unwilling to do repeatedly and so teams are going to continue dropping into those zones and make him throw into tight windows. But if they’re going to do that, there is one solution that right now, he’s just missing.

On this third-and-9, you can see Richardson lock onto Ricky Pearsall (#1). He then hurls the ball into what amounts to triple coverage as the zone shrinks. Meanwhile, poor Trevor Etienne (#7) is begging for the ball at the top of the screen. Could Etienne have gotten the first down? Well, he probably would have had to break a tackle, but that’s a high percentage play Richardson is going to have to take.

The same thing happened on Richardson’s interception. He is looking to the right side of the formation and coming back all the way to the left isn’t necessarily natural. But it’s a heck of a lot better than throwing the ball late over the middle.

Montrell Johnson is open. He would have to break one tackle to get the first down. But again, it’s the high percentage throw that addresses the deepness of the zones that USF was dropping into.

And we know Richardson can do it because we just saw him do it last week before everything fell apart.

On the Gators two-point conversation last week, Kentucky dropped its linebackers into coverage in the end zone. Richardson thought about scrambling, but then found Etienne open for the conversion.

This isn’t the only thing going wrong with Richardson. His confidence looks shot and it’s not a coincidence that Florida was ahead 16-7 last week before he started turning the ball over and that Florida was ahead 24-13 when he started turning the ball over against USF.

The reality is that Florida’s run game is good enough that a game manager is going to score a bunch of points. But a guy with a QB rating of 89.0 averaging 5.5 yards per attempt with 0 TDs and 4 INTs is going to make the offense sputter.

Napier

Florida fans are understandably frustrated with Napier, Richardson and the program in general after this win. But if there’s one place where they should point their ire, I think it’s this.

Montrell Johnson has 3 carries through 3 quarters.

— Will Miles (@WillMilesSEC) September 18, 2022

Here are the stats for the players leading the Gators in carries.

Montrell Johnson is the Gators best running back by a wide margin. He now has explosive runs of 40 and 62 yards the last two games. But even if you remove those runs from the ledger, he’s still averaging 6.0 yards per rush. That meshes with what he did last year at Louisiana, averaging 5.2 yards per rush.

If Napier wanted to keep him fresh by spelling him with Etienne, that would be fine. Etienne is averaging 7.5 yards per carry with a 21-yard explosive vs. Utah that if removed, still results in a 6.9 yards per carry average.

I like Nay’Quan Wright as a pass catcher. Quite honestly, I wish they’d use him in the flats in some of the plays I broke down up above. But he averaged 3.9 yards per rush on 54 carries in 2020, averaged 4.3 yards per rush on 76 carries last year and is averaged 4.2 yards per rush on 24 carries this season. At what point do we admit that he has some limitations as the starting running back?

Here’s an example.

Do you know how you can tell if a run play is blocked perfectly? It’s if the running back ends up with a one-on-one matchup in the open field with a defensive back. In this case (the first offensive play of the game for the Gators), Wright runs for a solid 8-yard gain. But Florida’s offensive line blocked it perfectly and Wright gets taken down by the only guy who can prevent a huge gain, the USF cornerback.

Compare that to Johnson.

The corner is the only guy who can get Johnson on the ground to prevent a first down and he makes him miss. Not only that, but he makes the safety coming up to make the tackle miss him too. The result is an 18-yard gain that could have been a 2-yard gain.

I’m in the camp where I think Napier has to know what he has with Anthony Richardson by the time the season is over. That means we’re going to experience some growing pains. But if you’re going to do that, you need to maximize the efficiency out of your other offensive skill positions. That means giving way more than six carries to Montrell Johnson.

Takeaway

There’s no doubt about it, this was an ugly win.

Two more interceptions, only forcing one punt (and that was after a false start prevented USF from going for it on fourth down), surrendering 286 rushing yards and being outgained 402-329 is certainly suboptimal. More than anything, it just seemed like USF was the tougher team, which is why the people messaging me used the phrases I started this article with.

Still, I’m left thinking about last year and how Florida always had one part of the team that cropped up and bit them. One game it was the offense. The next, it was the defense. That repeated itself this year when the defense couldn’t stop Utah in the opener and the offense stagnated against Kentucky.

Somehow, I leave this game against USF discouraged by Anthony Richardson’s play, the offense in general, Billy Napier’s play calling and the defense, yet Florida still won the game.

That won’t be good enough next week against the Vols, but part of me wonders whether this will be enough to get everyone’s attention and finally force the team to put together a complete performance.

Richardson has a ton to learn, but he’s two throws from this being a comfortable Florida win. Napier seems insistent that Wright is going to get his share of the carries, but maybe a close call like this will cause a reevaluation. Brenton Cox was a force on the last two Florida drives, one which forced the interception that led to the Gators go-ahead score. Can he play with that sort of force for an entire game?

That’s asking a lot of this team. We haven’t seen a complete game by a Florida Gators team since 2020 against Georgia, and even in that one, they were behind 14-0 almost before they got off the bus. It wouldn’t be surprise if this team got blown out by the Vols next week. But haven’t the Vols fans been promising that for nearly two decades now?

If Texas A&M’s win over Miami after losing to Appalachian State teaches us anything, it’s that week-to-week variation in college football is huge. It also says that there are definitely teams that show significant improvement from one week to the next.

But that’s all we really have to hold on to after this win. A loss to USF would have been allowing last week’s Kentucky loss to spiral into something much more significant. That spiral was avoided by the narrowest of margins, but it does mean there is still hope for a turnaround.

There’s not really any statistical reason to believe a turnaround is coming. There’s not a reason I’m seeing on the film to point towards it either. Florida has to get way better, and fast. Napier has his army to figure out how. Because Dan Mullen may have lost to Kentucky and Missouri.

But he never lost to the Vols.